The surreal treehoppers

Last week’s Nature highlighted the sculptures of Alfred Keller (1902-1955), and the example, a model of the Brazilian treehopper Bocydium globulare, struck me as one of the weirdest animals I’ve ever seen:

Martin Kemp describes Keller’s work:

Keller was trained as a kunstschmied, an ‘art blacksmith’. From 1930 until his early death he was employed by the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde (Museum of Natural History), painstakingly labouring over his recreations of insects and their larvae. Each took a year to complete. Keller worked first in plasticine, from which he cast a model in plaster. This plaster reference model he then recast in papier maché. Some details he added, cast in wax, with wings and bristles in celluloid and galalith (an early plastic material used in jewellery). Finally he coloured the surfaces, sometimes with additional gilding. The levels of patience and manual control Keller exercised were incredible. His fly, for example, boasts 2,653 bristles.

. . . Keller was a sculptor of monumental one-off portraits. Each model is a masterpiece, with no effort spared. It is difficult to see how such a skilled artisan could survive in today’s museums, with their emphasis on cost analysis. Keller’s exacting models may be things of the past, yet they are far from obsolete. Like the great habitat dioramas, they exercise a magnetic attraction.

The first thing a biologist does on seeing a model like this is think, “This can’t be real,” and resorts to some Googling. Sure enough, it’s a real insect. Here are two photos by Patrick Landmann (check out his other terrific nature photos):

The second thing one asks is, “What the bloody hell is all that ornamentation on the thorax?” (Note that the “balls” on the antenna-like structure aren’t eyes, but simply spheres of chitin.) A first guess is that it’s a sexually-selected trait, but those are often limited to males, and these creatures (and the ones below) show the ornaments in both sexes. Kemp hypothesizes—and this seems quite reasonable—that “the hollow globes, like the remarkable excrescences exhibited by other treehoppers, probably deter predators.” It would be hard to grab, much less chow down on, a beast with all those spines and excrescences.

Note, though, that the ornament sports many bristles. If these are sensory bristles, and not just deterrents to predation or irritating spines, then the ornament may have an unknown tactile function.

Membracids, related to cicadas, are in the class Insecta (insects, of course), the order Hemiptera (“true bugs”) and the family Membracidae. Like aphids, which are also “true bugs,” adult and immature treehoppers feed on plant sap.

For a wonderful panoply of membracid photos, download this pdf file. Here are some of the images, showing that, as Kipling said, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandu.” If Dali invented insects, they’d look like these (all photos by Patrick Landmann):

The color and shape of this last one makes me suspect that it’s mimicking a wasp:

Hhmm….I’ve always associated “black”smith with iron, as opposed to goldsmith, silversmith etc. “Kunstschmied” is a collective term for smiths where art is the main aspect (usually working with precious or semiprecious metals or at least with bronze) as opposed to a blacksmith, who makes horseshoes and whatnot.

I’m amazed that such ornamentation provides a fitness advantage, as the energetic costs to make and haul them around must be very significant, and it’s hard to imagine they function better than something like simple spines.

Without access to Nature at the moment, did any of his pre-war pieces survive 1945?

Otherwise, for works of a kunstschmied in the dictionary sense, if you find yourself at the U of Pittsburgh, the Cathedral of Learning is filled with Samuel Yellin’s work. My favorite details are the deer/elk heads atop the huge gate by the elevators – each is different.

I wonder though if anyone else is annoyed at seeing that usage of “one-off” ever more frequently? Can anyone explain how that’s supposed to mean one *of* a kind?

To me, “one off” means “one off the line.” That is, it’s a sample taken for statistical testing. This is the exact opposite of common usage, which I see as ever increasing. This disturbs me only slightly less than widespread magical thinking. Thank you.

To me, “one off” means “one off the line.” That is, it’s a sample taken for statistical testing.

I’ve never heard the term used in that way, and the common usage (“one of a kind”) seems to come from foundry work (in describing how many copies were to come “off” of a mould). The first usage of the specific term “one-off” in this sense dates to 1937.

Thanks, Tulse, for the link. So it’s not as without basis as I thought. Still seems awkward but maybe it won’t annoy me so much henceforth. I still think it would be more sensible to say “one-of,” though.

All of the individuals pictured are adults, with wings. This raises 2 questions
1. How functional are those wings? I’m thinking those ornaments really screw up the aerodynamics, and these things can’t actually fly.
2. What do the sub-adult stages look like? Hemiptera nymphs, from what I’ve seen, tend to look more-or-less like the adult, but without wings.

It’s surprising how “this can’t be real” turns to “you can’t make this shit up”. The made up ones tend to resemble existing creatures – frequently (but not always) made up by people with pretty limited imaginations. Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (but I love the PNWTE).

I know what the artists must feel like. I build instruments and people always want to rush things seemingly with no concern over quality of design and manufacture and usability.

That was my thought, too – they look just like insects that have been overtaken and killed by Cordyceps fungi (see the wonderful Attenborough video at http://www.youtube.com/#/watch?v=scPOQC_Lpgo). Protective mimicry, perhaps?

The last one certainly looks like a wasp mimic in this view. I wonder if it’s solitary rather than herd-forming.

The middle three do seem to have been selected to resemble plant bits. Membracids apparently spend a lot of time sitting on stems extracting sap and so are often very cryptic to human (and probably bird) eyes. Many look like leaves and some like thorns. They sometimes “spoil” their thorn mimicry by moving to the back side of the stem if you get too close. Thorns seldom do that.

I wonder why the Bocydium couldn’t be playing some sort of camouflage game too? Where does it feed? Do the globular ornaments resemble buds, or something, on a plant host?

In any event, the weird ornamentation should at least break up the “insect” outline of the thing and so might help hide it from visually hunting predators. Unless they turn specialist?

Is the antlered sp. without the globules a close relative? I wonder how its habitat/host differs.

It also underlines the limitless diversity that so bugged Darwin. Why should an Intelligent Designer create so profligately? (In fact if we were really meant to be Lords of Creation, why create other life at all? Of course Bocydium globulare might say the same thing.)

My first thought when I saw that last image (Heteronotus maculatus) was that it must have been lifted from a certain creationist coffee table book of fishing lures. Maybe this is life imitating art imitating life.

The traditional blacksmith, which we associate with horse shoeing, is called a “farrier.” There are also “ornamental blacksmiths” who use the same forge and tools to make gates, staircases, weather vanes, fences, and all manner of decorative garden and yard objects. Some incorporate other metals into their work (brass, copper, bronze, titanium, gold).

When I was a graduate student in entomology back in the 60s and early 70s, there was a display case in front of the departmental office filled with all manner of incredible insects. Privately, we called them our “Jesus Christ” bugs. People from the outside would come in, take one look, and go “Jesus Christ !!”

With the bristles on the globes . . . I too wondered if they could be related to sensing sound . . . kind of inside out ears.

I have never seen such insects before. There are so many apparently peculiar life-forms which are either too small to see or which live in places we can’t easily reach, it is frustrating. I feel I am missing out horribly in that by the time I die I will have seen hardly anything.

Concerning the bristled globes on top, they remind me of a piece of military hardware that can detect the source and trajectory of bullets. That hardware is shaped very much like one of the bristled globes. I wonder if it is, in fact, a sensory organ.

The May 5th Nature had a cover article on treehoppers. Careful anatomical and embryological study of the beauties appears to disclose that their helmets are really alterations of a pair of wings, suppressed in the first thoracic segment in all other insects for hundreds of millions of years.

Can anyone help me to identify an insect that lived in my garden last year? I grow morning glory every year and I keep constantly checking for insects that harm it. I saw something that resembled poop, here and there. I discover that there was a triangular pattern of it in different sizes. I wore glasses and touched that excrescence and goodness! It lifted up the ‘poop’ disguise to show a ‘naked’ soft insect, long and plump. I haven’t being able to find it anywhere. Thanks. MaricelLovesInsects

“The first thing a biologist does on seeing a model like this is think, “This can’t be real,” and resorts to some Googling.”
That’s exactly what I did and how I got here. I simply could not believe that this “thing” was for real. However, with this one I am going full head creationist! This was designed one day when the Allmighty had a few kids over and they were all playing with “life playdo” and He said “who can come up with the weirdest animal gets a free galaxy on a necklace!” This treehopper is the one that won! The winner was a little three year old called Zaphod.

46 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

[…] Alfred Keller and Treehoppers Last week Nature released an article on Alfred Keller, the insect artist that once worked for Berlin’s natural history museum, the Museum für Naturkunde. I don’t have (free) access to this article, but get a glimpse of this amazing craftsman’s work at Why Evolution Is True. […]

[…] Last week Nature released an article on Alfred Keller, the insect artist that once worked for Berlin’s natural history museum, the Museum für Naturkunde. I don’t have (free) access to this article, but get a glimpse of this amazing craftsman’s work at Why Evolution Is True. […]

[…] proved to be the most linked-to post I’ve ever made. At any rate, go back for a second and look at some of those things. Here are some more, taken from a new paper in Nature by Benjamin Prud’homme et al. […]